Snapdragon 810 puts last year's flagship phones to shame

Qualcomm's latest SoC blows its predecessor away

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The Snapdragon 810, Qualcomm's latest system on a chip that will power the next generation of smartphones, has displayed a huge boost in power compared to its predecessor.

We were invited to Qualcomm's headquarters in San Diego to test out the highly anticipated Snapdragon 810, and from the benchmarks we ran the performance improvements have made us very excited to get our hands on upcoming smartphones and tablets that will feature the improved CPU.

Running the Geekbench 3 benchmark on a specially made Mobile Development Platform Tablet that features Snapdragon 810, Qualcomm's latest scored an incredibly impressive 4733 in the multi-core tests.

The same Mobile Development Platform Tablet running the slightly older Snapdragon 805 scored just 2878, which means the 810 was 64.5% faster than its predecessor – a huge performance increase, especially when the 805 brought just a 9.7% increase over the 801 in the same tests.

Mobile Development Platform

The Mobile Development Platform Tablet we benchmarked included the sort of specifications we're expecting to see in upcoming flagship smartphones and tablets.

Along with a Snapdragon 810 with 64-bit octa-core processor clocked at 1.56GHz, the tablet comes with 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, a 7560 mAh battery and a demanding 4K screen.

Qualcomm's Mobile Development Platform Tablet

The Geekbench 3 score of 4733 represents a huge leap over some of the most powerful smartphones that are currently on the market, with the Nexus 6 scoring a once-impressive 3294 in the same benchmarks. The iPhone 6 Plus scored 2911, while the Samsung Galaxy S5 scored 2905.

Although the Mobile Development Platform we ran benchmarks on isn't a device that will be available to buy, we should see Snapdragon 810-toting devices getting similar scores in the future.

We also tested how power hungry the Snapdragon 810 is. We didn't have time to run our standard battery benchmark, but we did run the Antutu battery benchmark, which replicates medium to heavy use (playing games, reading websites and more) for 45 minutes. During that time the test device's 7560mAh battery dropped from 97% to 86%.

Considering the tablet was running a 4K screen, a battery drop of 11% over 45 minutes is pretty impressive.